A FEW weeks ago, I wrote about my optimism for 2017 and how the council’s vision for the town would start to bear fruit over the coming 12 months, with a number of exciting projects in the pipeline.

At the time of writing that column, the project to transform North Star into a regional leisure destination was not progressing as we had hoped and we had signalled our intention to terminate our agreement with Moirai Capital Investments unless the company met key requirements by last Thursday.

So I was absolutely delighted to learn last week that our action had prompted Moirai to bring one of the UK’s leading private capital funders on board with a proposal to take over the £100m scheme.

Seven Capital Investments Ltd, as was highlighted by this newspaper on Friday, is a major player in the field of property investment and views our scheme as an ideal opportunity to invest in the leisure market.

I read with interest some comments that we should have terminated our development agreement with Moirai two years ago and looked for a new partner. The comments suggested that if we had done so, we would have had an indoor ski slope by now.

Those comments are incredibly naïve. If we had ended our development agreement two years ago we would have been forced to go out to the market, in a difficult financial climate, to find another partner. We would effectively have been back to square one.

Progress at North Star was indeed slow and while Moirai had undertaken significant work on the scheme overall, which has identified strong interest from a number of operators, they had not been able to secure the funding to work up and deliver the scheme.

The council believes in partnership working, it is what underpins much of our good work. We do not have the resources to match our ambition, but if we can find partners with the expertise and the finance we stand a good chance of delivering the types of projects that will define the next chapter in Swindon’s history.

We have now entered into a period of due diligence with Seven Capital and, if that progresses well, discussions will take place to take the scheme forward.

Seven Capital has indicated that it wants to move quickly and that could see detailed planning submitted at the end of this year. If that is the case it is exciting news and we will keep readers informed of the plans for the site and the scheme’s subsequent progress.

I was optimistic at the turn of the year and now we have positive news with which to build.